Acronis, a provider of hybrid cloud data protection, today announced an initiative to develop applications of Blockchain technology for data protection. Acronis has formed a dedicated R&D team that will focus on delivering ‘tamper-proof’ data storage with verifiable sync and share solutions that leverage Blockchain to ensure data authenticity, privacy and control.

Blockchain technology, which provides a record of digital events distributed across different participants or entities, has the potential to open up a broad range of new data protection use cases for businesses and organizations worldwide.

Today’s digital world contains a huge number of assets whose originality and ownership are difficult and costly to define and track. Blockchain can solve this problem by providing global authenticity and security for data and transactions of any kind, reducing the cost and complexity of centralized systems, while making data ‘tamper-proof’. With Blockchain, data and transactions can only be updated by rules of consensus between participants in the system, and when new data is entered, it can never be erased.

Acronis is currently extending its data storage solutions and file sync and share solutions with Blockchain technology to monitor data integrity and guarantee validity at all times. Examples of data that can be protected from tampering using Blockchain include property and medical records, stock transfers, chain-of-evidence for court documents, police video or security camera footage, long-term archiving that could be subject to IT audits, and ‘consortium’ data storage, where multiple individuals or entities can securely store and exchange massive amounts of data and information.

As part of the initiative, Acronis is unveiling a prototype solution to give its service provider partners and end user customers an introduction to the power of Blockchain technology for data protection. The prototype shows an example of how Blockchain can be used to verify and protect data with timestamps and certificates of authenticity. By making the prototype available to the public, Acronis is seeking input on potential data protection use cases for Blockchain technology. Participants will be asked for their name and contact info in an effort to better understand the market need and potential of Blockchain for data protection.